Well, since Atlus announced their support for the 3DS and mentioned their persona franchise, we could hope for the best, Persona 2 (both of them) and hopefully truly remade, with 3D graphics and with a bearable encounter rate.

I wanted to play rorona, but after seeing totori screens just make me want the last one so much more.
I honestly don't get it why they take so much to localize a game, I mean, if anything people in the west, on contrary to a good portion of the east is the we are "graphic whores". Not us, RPG fans, but the usual media , reviewers and all, and taking that long to bring it here just makes it look a little older.

Not that I care, but with it I believe some games don't get the attention they deserve, sometimes even from people that like RPGs, I have myself missed/skipped some good titles because of this stalling.

I took it from a FAQ for all the request from people, Marageth and the Fox

=========================================================
Request No.1
Make a Ippon-datara(Hermit) with the Skill Sukukaja

Required Lv 17
Possible Fusions
(Temperance) Sylph(Sukukaja) X (Justice) Archangel
(Death) Ghoul(LV10:Sukukaja) X (Fool) Obariyon
=========================================================

Well, these have to be made from fusions, but I'm not sure if this particular persona can learn Sukukaja from scratch.
I don't know if you're aware, but when fusing personas, if you get out of the screen before accepting and then go back, the skills your new persona will learn will change, so once you know which personas to use, it's quite easy.

I can't say how I feel for not understanding the true meaning of the topic the first time. At first I thought that if you failed you mission in Fire Emblem, the game would auto-save (like in Demon's Souls, really quick) and you'd have to start from the beginning. Now I see it is about just one of the characters you control, I can definitively handle that! ;)

In FF Tactics we could lose a character if we'd let him turn to crystal and in Valkyria Chronicles too, after a few turns, so this isn't a big deal, I'll just have to play extra careful.

It isn't much of a problem because if I'm not wrong in the following chapter you can do the money trick to get rich !

It seems were among the few people that think Persona 3 was easier than 4 and P3 was my first SMT game.
I think P3 optional bosses were mostly challenging and a few of those were a real pain, some I've tried about 4 hours straight trying different strategies but the story bosses were a breeze. In P4 however, the story bosses were never push overs, in most of them I had to watch out so I wouldn't run out of MP, especially the ones that keep debuffing you.

If in Demon's Souls where dying every time and backtracking is stressful enough, dying for good makes it a no play for me.

I was about to say just that!

From the last 10 years, from Square that I:
- really enjoyed: FFX, FFX-2, Valkyrie Profile 2, FFXIII, The World Ends With You.

- though were okay (not that good, aren't all that bad): Dragon Quest VIII, Star Ocean 3, FF Tactics Advance 2, FFVII Crises Core, Star Ocean 4 (so far as I've played), Fullmetal Alchemist (I think it was the 2nd), VP Covenant of the Plume (could have been much better), Dissidia (I wish I liked it more, but something didn't 'sparkle' with me), Dragon Quest V (almost went the the good list)

- really bad: Last Remnant, Kingdom Hearts 1 (mostly bad gameplay and controls), Final Fantasy XI (total grind fest), Crystal Defenders ( a wasted opportunity to make a good game)

There are some games I played too little to give a proper comment or a few other I just forgot, but overall, most of the games for me at least are in the Great and Okay range so I would not worry.
Instead of saying some games were just plain bad, I'd say they were disappointments! If we'd talk about those, then I could fill a pool.

A lot of people are saying RoF is hard but I honestly can't see why. Challenging =/= hard !
But for me, as long as you manage some Tri-Attacks every now and then it's fine. But to not discredit some I must admit that whenever an enemy can cause you poison from easy it gets difficult really fast.

Maybe I'm being picky but I think Demon's Souls to be hard, because you don't have much room for error; in some missions of Valkyria Chronicles, sure, unless you came up with "the strategy of your dreams" they sure are hard, especially without losing characters but mostly it's just challenging.

My basic strategy for RoF is knowing which enemy to attack first, so I can build up Resonance points, then decide where to land on my Hero action, this for two reasons
1. So you can keep on running between you characters to build up Resonance points and
2. So you don't get punished to badly by enemies, and don't have to worry about using an item to cure yourself and losing the resonance points accumulated.

With this, only one boss in the game that took me about 5 tries, in most of them I don't even need to kill the minions.

A game which I thought it was near impossbile was SMT Devil Survivor on the DS. It starts just fine, not too hard, not to easy sometimes it challenges you a bit more, but still good. Near the end I don't know what happened but so many hard battles coming one after the other, especially those in which you have to save people from demons (it's already hard  to save yourself, let alone save others), but grinding was hard as enemies didn't give you much XP, money was so little I didn't even count it, you have a limited number of buys for that said demon, and near the last boss, so many of the bosses you fought come together, one after the other without even the option to save.
Later I found out I chose the hardest path ... So yeah, at least there's a reason for it (I think it was Amane's path).

I was about to post when I saw your post, Lard. You're right, Nocturne I was playing with cheats. Any normal enemy could kill you if you're not lucky enough.
Incredible that I didn't have much trouble with bosses, just the enemies themselves. Sometimes they attack one after the other, all on you, and there you go: Game Over.

I know. In an MMO it's still a pain but it's understandable since most of them have PvP, so everybody getting anything easily could somehow break the game, but it still doesn't mean that it should be impossible to get.
But in a single player RPG I think it's simply outrageous.

I remember watching some videos of people getting the Seitengrate bowbow in FFXII on youtube, they have to keep opening an INVISIBLE box item, and then go some screens away for it to respawn.
I just did some research to post here, the drop rate is: "Seitengrate bow = 0.0001% chance"!!!

Isn't it just overkill ? Like I said before, if they don't want us to use it in anything in the game, why don't they just put this as a reward for beating the strongest enemy in the game ? Sure, there aren't anything left to kill but at least it's a prize with a single 100% drop.

Developers could do this back in the NES, SNES and early PSX days when we didn't have internet to share this things with everybody, but nowadays if I see people telling me I have to go through 'out of this world' drop rates to play a game, guess what ? I just don't even touch the game and they just lost some bucks. If the game is a fair challenge (even if it's more than I can take), Monster Hunter, Demon's Souls, etc then it's Ok but if they don't this just for their own sordid pleasure, count me out.

I quote that, I'm totally against paying a single penny more than the game's retail price. Doing so just helps inflation in the game price. If anything the price of something old and used should go down, not up! We're not talking about a one only existent piece of art, it's a game printed on thousands of copies.

Going a little of my way here, but I do hate when companies like Atlus and Tecmo decide to do this crap, and then some time later they do an "auction house" on their site selling the game for $100. Come on, if there is people wanting your game they should just reprint it and make much more money. I can't understand what kind of business they try to run. I mean, Sega's Valkyria Chronicles started selling like crap when released, but now it's not far from reaching a million. And why is that ? because they made sure supply and demand were on good terms and both gamers and developers win!

I remember when I saw on ebay Valkyrie Profile for $200 and in my gaming rent store (which is crap) they had it,the though of buying it from them just to sell it had crossed me, but I didn't want to help inflate the price of another awesome game. I'm sure people pirated games because of this, and how can you blame them ? Developers aren't making a dime out of it. Good thing we have this thing now of downloading games from PSN, Live, Steam and Nintendo shop, etc. Sure sometimes the price there is a little higher than street price, but at least if you want the game regardless if you live in a country which is a little more difficult to get at a good price, like mine, even living in one of the biggest cities in the world, or you live in some god forsaken place, if you have internet, you can get the game.

Adding more to the list, they are basically thing they annoyed me on every Dragon Quest game:

- Quest that lead to another quest, that leads to an stupid quest which leads to an even dumber stupider quest and so on.

- Quoting Dincrest, Random encounters in puzzle rooms.

- When items have special abilities but they are not mentioned anywhere, so you have to guess, and sometimes you don't know what just happened.

- When you have buff or debuffs on your characters and you can tell which, again Dragon Quest in this point is a pain. You have a magic barrier and sometimes in one of the characters it disappears but good look knowing which , I could point this too in Shin Megami Tensei, it's a little less problematic here since the game sometimes tells you you already have the magic on you, but still annoying. FFXII and FFXIII did it great, just a small nice icon and we're set but if they don't want to go through all that trouble, just put a letter on top of the characters head or whatever.

- Drop rates. Anything below 5% rate is offensive to me as a human being, I'm mean let alone I'm using my time to play your game and not only that but I need to kill monter X a thousand times to get an item ? If developers don't want us with a ton of said item why they don't just put it on a really hard monster, like those that you even need to use some rare consumable items. If anything about FFXII this was problably the biggest reason I hated it.

I'm sure there are a lot more, I just can't think of them right now.

So are you guys enjoying it so far ? I'm still on the fence, but I do have some "credits" on my PSN account so I would only need to add a few more.
From what I've seen I weirdly found the characters sprites to not be of my liking ... I really don't know why
edit: guess what, I mistook this game's pictures for Mimana Iyar Chronicle, probably why I didn't like the sprites.

Nocturne also had lots of random battles but I think I didn't get tired of them because of the dark mood the game creates, so even if it has less plot time, it helps.
Strange Journey has some issues that I hate the most in Dragon Quest games.

I have to agree with you CDFN , I don't know how much patience I have left for this.
I was never to use cheats in RPG, but some games seems like they ask for it. Not because they are unbeatable of something, far from it, but to be enjoyable.

I got this App and even though it did help, a lot, there's still a lot of frustration. Also it could have more save points scattered around dungeons. They are already big and we're playing on a portable system.
If I'm not mistaken Persona 2 didn't have these problems, I mean, to this extend but I only playing a little of it, so I can't say for sure.